Baboe Dalima; or, The Opium Fiend

by M. T. H. Perelaer

At first, he could hardly see anything: but presently his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and he began, moreover, to feel more confidence in the feat of tight-rope walking he was trying to accomplish. Thus he advanced deeper and deeper still into the cavity. At length, close beside a slab of trachyte against which the water was dashing furiously, he thought he could descry something.

Taking advantage of every prominent bit of rock he carefully let himself down, and he was fortunate enough to succeed in reaching the mass of trachyte. He found its surface uneven enough to give firm foothold, and at length he found some natural steps by which he could venture to descend to the water’s edge. And when he got there—there was his Anna, quite unconscious! She had, in her drowning agony, clutched at the rugged face of the rock. The lower part of her body lay floating about in the water; but her head was resting on her arm, which encircled one of the out-jutting pieces of stone.

Charles seized her, he grasped her waist and tried to drag her up against the face of the boulder. The tide was rising and he had need to make haste; for every moment it seemed more probable that Anna would be washed away by the back-rushing waves. By dint of putting forth all his strength, Charles at length succeeded in dragging her to the upper surface of the slab, and then he sat down beside her. He took off his coat and spread it out upon the stone to make his Anna as comfortable a resting place as he could. Her head was resting on his lap and, in that position, he allowed her for awhile quietly to rest.

A single glance around had satisfied van Nerekool of the fact that the highest tides had never reached the top of the block of stone, and that therefore they were, as far as the sea was concerned, in a place of safety.

With his handkerchief he gently wiped away the sea-water from her pale countenance, and he took a strange delight in spreading out upon his knees her luxuriant mass of black-hair as if to dry it. He knew also that it would be worse than useless to try and get out of the cave before low water, the violence of the waves was too great to admit of any such hope. But, he thought, that, at dead-low water it might be possible to reach the ladder which was still tossing about in the entrance of the cave. By that time he had no doubt that Anna would have regained consciousness, and he knew she could swim. Then once on the ladder—However! he thought, time will bring counsel! Thus musing he gazed down at the beautiful girl who lay there helpless on his knees, Murowski, he thought, and Grenits would surely do something to come to the rescue.

It was indeed a critical moment in the young man’s life. There, stretched out before him, lay the one being who was dearer to him than all the earth, the one being whom he adored with all the power of his soul, the one being who had robbed him of sleep and deprived him of rest, whose dear image was always and everywhere floating before him. The one human being whom he longed for, whom he yearned to call his own, with all the passionate eagerness and all the tenderness of his impulsive nature.

Anna, in her Javanese dress, was covered only by her sarong and kabaja. The slendang, which had served as her head-dress, she had lost in her descent down the ladder. This extremely primitive costume, made of the lightest and most flimsy materials, was now wet through; and there lay the poor girl unconscious on the lap of her lover, who was suffering torments which might fitly have found a place in Dante’s Inferno.

The dim twilight and the finely divided spray which hung all around seemed to bathe that virgin form in a kind of mystic ether and imparted to the entire scene something weird and sublime.

Slowly—very slowly—time rolled on—too slowly for poor Charles van Nerekool.

Meanwhile the water no longer rose, and the turn of the tide was beginning to be felt. Every wave which rushed in, roared and boiled and foamed just as did the former one; but yet the water did not reach quite so high, nor did the waves rage so furiously.